


Higgledy-Piggledy

by pavilargo



Category: Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs
Genre: Frictional Fan Jam: Summer Writing Jam, Gen, Prequel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:34:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25949683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pavilargo/pseuds/pavilargo
Summary: A Wretch is born in the early beginnings of what looks to be a cold, harsh winter, where he can only cling to a former self fragmented into distant dreams.They say that pigs are one of the most intelligent animals next to man.[Winner of the Frictional Games Summer Writing Jam! Prompt: Summer/Memories.]
Comments: 6
Kudos: 7





	Higgledy-Piggledy

**Author's Note:**

> As the summary states, this was written for the Frictional Fan Jam Summer Writing Event! I wrote it on Google Docs with standard settings, which made it end up being about 8 pages. I only mention that since I know the event had a maximum length limit hehe. Machine for Pigs is one of my favorite video games of all time. I absolutely adore it to death and I'm so excited about having had the chance to get this out. Hope you all enjoy! Oink oink!

**It was early winter when I was born,** a time of year when the nights grew longer and darker and the sunlight paler and greyer with each passing day, when the cold wind howled outside like the Big Bad Wolf and we were mere little piggies huddling inside for safety, praying our fortress strong enough to protect us.

I believe I was one of the earliest to be born, as there were much less of us in the beginning, and our home much more rudimentary. My first awakening was a violent one; I awoke in a frenzy, instinct exploding within me, and I writhed and flailed and attacked my own flesh with claws and fangs like a feral animal trying to rid itself of a disease permeating through every vein in its own body. Hooves scraped and clamored against the ground, creating a chaotic cacophony of harsh, echoing clatter, and at first I could not process that they were my own, although they did not feel like foreign limbs either.

The sound of a beast shrieking like death rang in my ears, and I had not yet learned that these sounds were my own. Then the shrieking turned to a rough heaving, and the sensation of drowning came upon me. A weak tremble in my throat evoked the sensation of something pushing its way upwards, towards my mouth, which tasted of metal. I hacked and choked and made horrible noises, rough gargling bellows and grunts as I tried in vain to clear my lungs of a thickness that I could not regurgitate. Finally it came, and my dry heaving became very wet, and I choked and gagged and made more terrible noises until finally from within me came an awful, detestable substance. It felt thick, fleshy and malleable in my mouth, and I had to force it out with one last rough, hacking cough like I was ejecting from the depths of my organs a horrible overgrown slug, but when it hit the ground it was flattened into a splatter of deep red, with nothing solid left behind but foul-smelling chunks of scarlet gore.

I remained hunched over on all fours for a short while, heaving and panting, my lungs clear but my body physically exhausted and my limbs trembling weakly. My mouth burned with the bitter acid sting of bile and blood. I felt raw all over, every limb felt misshapen, twisted backwards, but lacking in pain, only an uneasy discomfort as if each cell was awkwardly contorting as it tried and failed to position itself comfortably around my infant soul. I collapsed onto my front and lay on cold stone, my heaving breaths slowing to a more peaceful state.

I soon became aware of a noise which until now had been drowned out by my own hysteria. The sound of breathing and grunting not unlike my own and the soft scraping of hooves against the ground floated from the air to my ringing ears. I opened my eyes slowly. My vision was blurrier than I had noticed before, I had trouble making heads or tails out of anything I now peered up at. What at first appeared as only shapeless blobs of fleshy, rotting pink slowly became a small, huddled mass of… I was not quite sure what, actually. Beings. Beings like myself. I recognized them and yet I did not. But these strange creatures instilled a sense of comfort in me; I felt a camaraderie with them that I could not explain. I forced myself up, first on four legs, then clumsily onto two, then I fell back to four again. My limbs trembled. I could not find proper footing no matter how many or how few I planted on the hard stone floor below me.

I let out a pitiful bellow in a voice that felt wholly unfamiliar even as it burst from my throat not unlike the vomit I had just expelled. To my surprise the creatures in front of me returned the sound, conversing with me in this new voice, this new language. I could speak with them — further proof or our kinship, whatever we were. Some of them approached me now, snuffling out greetings as they came forward. Although I had no means of looking at my own reflection, I knew that these beasts were quite like me in every way. They, too, appeared to be contorted beings of misshapen flesh. They wore dirty cloth over parts of their bodies, and I realized quickly that I did as well.

The modest clothing struck a chord within me. I felt an odd sense of relief at being clothed, somehow having been born with a sense of almost ironic modesty. Another part of me wondered why I would even think of clothing, why it mattered what parts of me were covered. I stood in a dazed stupor as my brain worked to make sense of these two conflicting sides of my thought process.

My fellow creatures grunted to get my attention and then turned away, towards a doorway, and I followed them then to another room. Everything moved so quickly; I did not stop to look around, did not pay attention to my surroundings or give second thought to anything but the immediate situation presented to me. Here, chunks of meat lay scattered on the floor — another sign of the primitive living space which would eventually be replaced with something much grander. We would dine at tables eventually, but for now our humble feast was eaten off of the dirty ground, and none of us thought anything of this, happy to stoop to the level of any other animal if it meant filling our bellies. I was hungrier than I had realized, and my body felt rejuvenated by the food before me.

The experience of eating the meat was familiar, but I could not understand why. Eating was familiar, the taste of the animal flesh, the sensation of chewing, of swallowing, of both hunger and fullness. I knew these feelings, but how could I? I had been born only moments ago, opened my eyes for the first time to a room of dark stone and grime with these fellow beasts as my only companions. How I could remember what I had never before experienced was a mystery beyond my grasp.

I would soon come to find that much of my life existed within such a phenomenon, this confusing duality of experience a constant inner battle that vexed my waking thoughts whenever I was left alone with them. Or perhaps thoughts is not quite the word — I was not necessarily thinking, no. I was experiencing, and within the experiences were reflexes of a previous self I could not parse. I would have flashes of cold familiarity that I could not understand, echoes of a life that were both my own and yet not my own. Existence itself, the act of living, of breathing, of interacting with and experiencing the world around me, was a sensation that I knew well, but it was all fragmented into bits and pieces, not unlike my own body, so strangely incoherent it felt, like a collage of haphazardly placed skin and bone.

Even the sensation of being trapped in a small space was something that I could recognize and remember, a tingling familiarity rattled my senses and a dulled part of my brain told me that it had been unpleasant then, as it should have been now, but like the sensation of clothing I was conflicted by such an assertion. There was a comfort in being confined among these strange and friendly fellows, and I feared the world beyond the dark walls that kept us in. It was a world that, despite the flashes of memories that seemed to shake my inner self and force me to an awareness of a consciousness that outlived my current state of existence, I could not yet even begin to imagine.

After some time of eating our humble meal, the sound of the animalistic chewing, the teeth ripping through meat, was drowned out by something new. The echoing clatter of heavy hoofsteps echoed down the hallway before us, alongside a thunderous grunting vocalization that mirrored our own but louder, rougher, deeper. A larger being, my senses told me, and I lifted my head and looked around. I saw that my fellow mealtime companions had noticed the sound of the approaching beast as well and we had all come to a halt. Our heads were lifted and we waited, breathing softly, ears alert.

My vision was still blurry, every image before me still too overwhelming for my only recently-awakened eyes and brain, still struggling to process it all. But from down the hallway I saw now the silhouettes of beings much larger than us, their shadows distorting against the wall so that they towered over our puny forms. As the owners of the shadows came forward I saw they were smaller than their dark reflections had made them seem, but still they were bigger than any of us there. They looked somewhat like us, the same noses, ears, hooves, the strange semi-upright posture, the same strange mishapenness of each limb. And yet they were clearly more powerful; their postures were sturdier, their bodies bulkier and thicker, their grunting deeper and more powerful than our own.

The others of my small herd moved quickly to the side as they approached. I, unknowing, did not.

With a loud bellow that roared like thunder through our strange living space the larger creatures rushed forward, towards the pile of food from which we had been feasting. Before I could be allowed even a moment to process this I felt a powerful burst of pain erupt from the side of my head, and a moment later my body was flung into the stone wall, which it hit with a thud that sent every nerve in my back into an aching throb. My pitiful squeals of pain rang out and after a brief bout of sore disorientation, I looked over to see the larger creatures eating from the meat that had been ours moments before.

Even as my body pounded with pain and my head spun and my vision blurred, I came to the understanding that these larger creatures, although like us in many ways, held some sort of superiority above us and were not to be challenged or bothered.

As I lay there against the wall in a daze, the sound of an approaching being once more filled my ears, although this one was nothing like the last. These were hurried, smooth footsteps that lacked the hobbling limp of my kin or the larger beasts. I looked around and came to notice a barred door, imprisoning us with metal rods, keeping us in and keeping anything on the other side, which led to a long corridor, out. From the corridor glowed a bright light that only grew brighter as the footsteps grew louder, bathing the hallway and then all of us with a warm yellow. Silence fell over me and my fellow creatures as I saw, for the first time in my life, a human man. He was ghostly pale, thin, and I intuitively felt that he looked very sickly, although I could not understand why.

“What’s all this commotion?” the man asked. I stared at him, still dazed, my head still throbbing dully and my body sore, blinking small eyes and studying him. There was a longing deep within me that I could not explain as I looked at him, at his long and nimble legs that held him there, upright, at his fingers that grasped the lantern with such delicate precision, at the intentionality of the placement of his limbs, the expressiveness of his gaunt face. I felt an odd detachment then, a disconnect from my newborn self as a dysphoric nostalgia swept over me.

The man continued speaking. The sounds he made were just barely within my grasp. I could almost understand them, as if listening to someone speak in a sister language, a tongue not my own but similar enough that there was occasional overlap and vague familiarity. “Keep it down, will you? There is much that still needs to be done.”

With that, he left us alone. The larger beasts resumed their meal, and I stiffly got up, my body aching and my sore limbs cracking back into place, and shuffled over to my smaller companions, who greeted me with great sympathy.

Cold winter winds briskly swept time forward. The winter bore on, harsh and cold even from within our little chamber. However, as if to laugh in the face of natural order, our creator, who I came to understand was the same man who had approached us on the night of my first awakening, seemed to view the cold season as a time of birth and new life, and slowly new faces began to emerge. He would bring them in unconscious, hauling them by cart, dumping them as we slept or ate or played. We would find them before they awoke, usually, but sometimes after, when they had already begun to face the violent throes of birth and taken their first pained breath of this new life.

I grew to have a strong attachment to the newborns. They looked like me; we did not grow or change, as I thought infants ought to do. But we certainly grew mentally, evolving into an acceptance of our state of existence that we certainly did not seem to immediately possess. I felt a great deal for them, and at times when I engaged with them I was struck with a strange sentimentality, a ghostly wisp of nostalgic yearning not unlike the strange familiar sensation that was brought about by gazing upon the human figure or consuming food — A distant memory, so faint it seemed foreign, like a dream I had woken from long ago. As I comforted these newborn creatures, these kin that were so lost, so unable to comprehend their surroundings, I felt ancient memories of a time before, when I had held small children close to my body, gazed down upon the soft and writhing pink flesh and heard its newborn cries.

At night us smaller creatures huddled together for warmth, a great, lumpy sea of greyish pink skin and jagged, lopsided limbs. We taught the newborns to avoid the larger beasts, as they were brutish and stronger than we. They seemed capable of things we were not; our creator sent them away with carts and barrels, and they roamed freer than we. They were our superiors, but they acted with no tact in their leadership. We avoided them when they passed us, and we spent our time playing amongst ourselves.

The winter brought more changes. Our enclosure grew larger and larger, first in population size and then in terms of the physical interior. One day we awoke to find ourselves in a new environment; I do not remember falling asleep that night and I assume now that our human creator must have induced an artificial unconsciousness upon us all in order to safely move us from one place to the other. Here was much grander, but further, it seemed, from the outdoors. I believe that we had been kept in something above ground before, for there was light in the day which was replaced by electric light at night, and the air felt fresh with morning frost. Here, there were fewer barred doors, more room to move about, more crevices to explore, and a long, grand table that was piled high each day with more meat than we could have imagined, but the tradeoff was the stuffiness of sewage air, and that the days and nights blurred together, as we were now hidden from the upper world and whatever it could have possibly held, a world that only existed in my faintest of dreams.

Further, I soon came to find that the new dining arrangement brought to me the same queer, nostalgic melancholy that so many other things before it had. It was certainly familiar. In fact, it was almost a relief to engage in a meal while upright. And yet I missed too the sensation of eating off of the floor, which had felt equally natural to me, making the table dining feel, by comparison, quite unnatural. It felt at times that I was torn between two halves, although what those two halves could be I could not say. I had an inkling of a thought that perhaps my brain was sutured unevenly into disorganized clumps of organ comparable to my limb and flesh.

Our living space continued to become more advanced. We were given a hallway of sleeping chambers, and were delighted to find them filled with toys, a luxury that we had never before had and which greatly enriched our playtime. We enjoyed blocks and rubber balls and stuffed dolls that often were torn apart quite violently, which was perfectly fine by everyone as spreading the fluffy white entrails of inner stuffing around the chambers was an equally engaging sport.

A second delight came in the form of candles, which, retrospectively, I do not know why we were trusted with, but it was with immense excitement that we entered the spacious underground cavern where our grand dining table sat to find that it had been decorated one day with tabletop candelabra made of shiny golden metal. It was a hearty and warm decoration that seemed to put us all in good spirits. In fact, this new living arrangement seemed even to remove some of the tension between us and the larger creatures who had been so mercilessly cruel to us before, if for no other reason than the added amount of space alone. We could give them more room, avoid them easier, and we no longer had to risk a fight for our meals as there was more than enough food for everyone nowadays.

Still, there were downsides, the largest perhaps being the fact that newcomers were being born nearly every day now, sometimes in batches. Although we had more than enough space to accommodate them, the small tribe we had forged in our early home was beginning to grow out of hand. We were like a twisted experiment on the effects of overpopulation, of a herd growing too quickly without any control. Our creator certainly was not monitoring us. I was amongst droves of strangers, creatures that looked like me but with whom I was not acquainted, whom I had no time to become acquainted with before more and more were thrown headfirst into the pack, into this strange world below the surface full of confused half-beings unable to fully understand what was happening to them, what had happened to them that had gotten them here in the first place. And with so many newborns arriving each day, I was not there to protect them from the larger beasts. None of us were. It was pure luck if we got to them before the bigger ones did, if one of us had the chance to teach them how to thrive before they met with a fate as painful, if not moreso, than mine when I had first awoken and so ignorantly stood before the brutes that posited themselves as superior to us. 

This is what I most place the blame upon when I think back to the most difficult night in our new home, although as I look back now I consider it more of a chain reaction, the tipping point of a number of smaller factors that added up to this disastrous occurrence in our world underground.

It was luck that I happened upon this scene when I did, for I had only been wandering the halls out of boredom, having lost interest in the rubber ball that I had been kicking around my chamber and now seeking something else to stimulate me. I had hobbled into the dining room to see that the larger creatures were feasting upon a large pile of meats, lit up by the dim, flickering firelight of the candles we all adored. It was a mouthwatering sight that I stared at enviously, but I knew that there would be more than enough for us later, I had no need to impose upon this crowd now. There was always enough to go around nowadays. But as I stood watching, I noticed another figure enter the scene: A smaller creature, similar to myself, puny and misshapen, walking in that uneven gait that we all possessed, our limbs protruding awkwardly from our bulging, distorted flesh. But despite our similarities I did not recognize him. His limp was worse than mine, his body weak and unsteady, and I realized that he was a newborn, a being still wholly unfamiliar with himself and this new world that he had just become an unwilling member of.

He approached this group of the larger creatures now, and I stepped forward and grunted out to him. He did not hear me, and continued his tentative approach. Once he had caught the attention of the larger creatures they ceased their meal and watched him with as much interest as I, although I knew their curiosity was far less benevolent.

It was only once he reached for a piece of the meat from the tabletop himself that they really reacted. They did not like that one bit.

The large creatures ganged up on this smaller one now, attacking him so very viciously, beating him with their heavy hooves and shoving him to the floor. His pitiful squeals echoed through my ears and rang through the spacious chamber, I was distraught by the bloody sight of his skin ripped by tooth and claw, assaulted by beings so much larger than himself. His body and mind were still so new, he was so young and so unaware of the workings of this harsh world, and these creatures, perhaps having grown mad with power as our conditions had improved and they were tasked with more and more duties by our creator, perhaps having grown tired of our momentary time of pacifism, seemed eager to take out all of their pent up rage and ego on this poor, ignorant swine.

I intervened. I would not stand for it. My voice erupted from my throat in a bellow that lacked the raw power of the larger beasts and came out an oinkish squeal, not nearly as threatening but certainly attention-grabbing. The beasts turned to me, away from their hapless victim. I let out another warning bellow and the beasts seemed fully intrigued now, willing to give me the attention I was demanding as I had been brave — or foolish — enough to seek it out.

I rushed to my kin’s side. My mind raced with thoughts I could only barely decipher. I thought of all I had endured in this meager imitation of life, and all that I had lost in the life that had come before. Through this existence the reality of reincarnation had been proven, and yet something had been wrongly added to the formula, leaving me a creature both only half alive and yet doubly so, living the life of both myself and others, others so distant from me now that they truly felt like a lifetime ago. I was singular, I was half, I was double. I had been whole once, I had been separate once. I had been myself and I had been many selves.

I had felt love once.

The larger beasts accepted my challenge wholeheartedly, and in a moment I was experiencing immeasurable pain in every limb as I was kicked, scratched, bitten, tossed around like my rubber ball and then thrown. I slammed into the wooden table, my aching body wet with blood and saliva and the juices of the leftover meat as I collapsed into the heaping food pile. The table trembled under the force of my weight colliding with it. Quite suddenly, then, a blinding golden light went ablaze behind me, and my tender, throbbing body grew quite hot. Shadows of flame licked the walls all around us and the faces of my attackers were lit up before me in a searing orange. The candles had been knocked over and caught fire.

Smoke filled my lungs. I coughed violently and vomited up a great deal of blood. But my body, sore and trembling, was warmed like a tight embrace by the flame behind me, and my attackers backed away now, a glimmer of fear finally revealing itself to me in their tiny, dull eyes. My kin, crumpled in the corner, stared with a sort of awe. At me or the fire, I could not tell. The flames which should have been like Hellfire, spreading their destructive heat through the small living space, burning through our meal, threatening to burn down the entirety of the cavernous home we lived in and us along with it, felt not like Hell to me at all. Instead, my brain grasped once more for the lives I had once existed in, the world that had been known to me before my rebirth.

I longed for summer. I longed for the sunny warmth of a season that existed before my time and beyond my grasp. Smoke clouded my lungs and brain. The stone and metal that surrounded us heated rapidly like a giant oven. I dreamt hazily of the clear blue sky, the kiss of fresh summer air, the brush of grassy green fields baked like fresh pastry by bright sunlight.

I do not remember my final thought before I lost consciousness.

When I awoke, it was in a pained fit of coughing that tore my throat, with an ache through my entire body so intense that I could barely think. I coughed until I saw blood splatter the stone beneath my hooves, and I felt tears of stinging pain slide down my long snout until they, too, hit the ground. I had never cried before. As I slowly returned to my senses, I came to realize that I was in a small holding cell, and gazing before me from the outside was my human creator, his lantern shining in his delicate, nimble human hands. The lantern light reflected off of the metal bars between us, causing them to flicker like flame.

He looked worse off than even before, pale and thin, a skeleton of what he had once been.

“Damn unruly beast, you are. Could have destroyed my entire operation!” he shouted at me. I could barely understand him, but I snarled back in defiant anger, comprehending that he was trying to punish me and refusing to sit back and take it. If I could stand up to the larger beasts, I could certainly stand up to this scrawny, sickly excuse for a man. I was all of him and so much more, I realized now. “Enough! Blasted animal. Foolish, disorderly animals, you all are. Not even with the great lengths I have gone to cleanse you could the dark blemish rotting away at your soul be purified. Blasted animal!”

A loud, angry bellow left my charred throat. He said nothing else. I watched, heaving and huffing with anger, as my creator walked away and slammed the heavy door behind him, leaving me alone in the darkness to rot away in my cell, in my misshapen body of crudely stitched together parts, in a brain that most certainly matched my exterior. I hated him then, but I could do nothing with my hatred but rot away with it. I lay there before my own small puddle of blood and tears, and although I was so very deep underground that the fresh air of the outside world was as far away as the summers of a previous life so foreign to me now that I could no longer remember the joy of warmth on my skin, I knew that it was going to be a very long, very cold night.


End file.
